Re-examining one of the world’s most notorious assassinations

MOST murder mysteries end with a revelation: the sleuth explains who did it, where, why and how. But how do you tell a gripping story when all of that is known? Josh Ireland, a writer and editor, overcomes that problem in a new book about one of the most famous murders in history: that of Leon Trotsky, in Mexico City, with an ice pick. (Actually it was a mountaineering axe, but why split hairs over splitting heads?) The murderer was Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist and secret agent, acting on the orders of Josef Stalin, who loathed his one-time rival.

What is there new to say, 86 years later? A lot, it turns out. Mr Ireland has a novelist’s eye for detail and captures the characters’ complexity. Trotsky was brilliant, charismatic and a gifted speaker; he was also vain and aloof. One reason Stalin, rather than he, succeeded Vladimir Lenin was that Trotsky “took no time to meet the Bolshevik faithful” after his electrifying speeches. One of his most ardent admirers admitted that his capacity for friendship was “about on the level of a barnyard fowl”.

Mercader, meanwhile, was charming, handsome, eloquent and “a gifted actor who appeared to actively enjoy deceit…in short, the perfect spy”. He was an agent for the Soviet internal police, the NKVD, which committed atrocities at Stalin’s command. The book follows him as he travels between America and Mexico in the run-up to the assassination (after a hilariously incompetent first attempt involving machineguns and liquor failed).

“The Death of Trotsky” does not offer new breakthroughs or revelations about this notorious crime. But narrative masterworks do not always need to unearth new history, if they can combine meticulous research with propulsive pacing. This was true with Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” (2003), a bestseller about a serial killer and Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2017), about the Osage murders.

Mr Ireland’s book opens in 1907 with Stalin’s and Trotsky’s first meeting, at a conference for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London: “The two men felt an immediate and almost physical revulsion for each other.” Trotsky was eloquent and authoritative; Stalin apparently said nothing for three weeks of meetings. They are the two poles of the narrative, though they never saw each other again after Stalin exiled Trotsky in 1929. Over the course of the book, Trotsky wanders anxiously around the world, as Stalin seethes and plots from Moscow.

Trotsky lived with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for as long as they could tolerate each other. Natalia, Trotsky’s doting wife, acted as an intermediary between her husband and the world. People floated in and out of their lives; Mr Ireland brilliantly foreshadows the end by emphasising Trotsky’s naive indifference to security (he hated searching visitors for weapons).

Trotsky has long been one of the left’s great “what ifs”. (If only he had outmanoeuvred Stalin to succeed Lenin, the Soviet Union might never have endured so much violence, some believe.) Mr Ireland does not agree. Compared with Stalin, Trotsky seems almost meek, but in fact he was just as eager to kill as any other Bolshevik. While still in Russia he approved summary executions and village burnings in response to a peasant rebellion and helped create the NKVD. “We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of life,” Trotsky once said ominously.

Mr Ireland shows that Trotsky’s murder was less tragic than pathetic. By the time of his death he was isolated and powerless, living on the cinders of his reputation. Stalin murdered him out of personal hatred and paranoia, not because he had any actual reason to fear him. Nor is this ancient history. Once upon a time critics of Russia’s leaders ended up axed down or shot; more recently they have fallen out of windows and been poisoned. Plus ça change. ■